The U.S. Effectively Surrenders in the Argument About the Origin of COVID-19

 The World Health Organization has proposed 26 scientists for a new group to investigate the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as future outbreaks. Unfortunately, as a letter from U.S. Right to Know lays out, some of the 26 proposed scientists have glaring conflicts of interest. One scientist is a subcontractor on a 2020 multi-million-dollar NIH grant to EcoHealth Alliance.

A second scientist signed a letter in The Lancet, orchestrated by Dr. Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance, arguing that the SARS-CoV-2 lab origin hypothesis is a conspiracy theory.  A third claimed that a lab leak origin of SARS-CoV-2 is a “typical conspiracy theory.” A fourth claimed that a lab origin hypothesis of SARS-CoV-2 has been debunked. U.S. Right to Know justifiably asks why people who have declared they already know what happened, and are ruling out scenarios, are being named to an investigative committee.

Closer to home, two months have passed since the U.S. intelligence community came back to the president with no conclusive answers on the origin of COVID-19, offering the public only a two-page summary declaring, “two hypotheses are plausible: natural exposure to an infected animal and a laboratory-associated incident.” (Thanks, Captain Obvious.) If the Biden administration or intelligence community are continuing to investigate the origins of the pandemic, they’re doing so very quietly. Biden offered no statement after the intelligence community report, and neither he nor anyone in his administration has publicly addressed the origin of COVID-19 since the report arrived. As far as the public can tell, the intelligence community’s non-answer seems to have settled the question for the Biden administration.

Earlier this month, the Japan Times contended the Biden administration’s strange lack of follow-up after the intelligence community offered nothing new represented a de facto concession to China’s Xi Jinping and his preferred narrative of the pandemic. “Biden should have ordered the U.S. intelligence community to keep searching for the true origins of the virus until a definitive conclusion could be reached. By not extending the inquiry’s 90-day deadline, Biden in effect gave the Chinese what they wanted.”

Meanwhile, researchers at the Chinese CDC is making public statements declaring they think they have solved the mystery.

The cluster of COVID-19 infections at a seafood market in Wuhan, Hubei province, in late 2019 was likely triggered by cold chain imports contaminated by the novel coronavirus, researchers from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention said.

They found that dozens of foreign regions that had shipped cold food products to Wuhan, including the Huanan seafood market, overlapped with areas that reported very early traces of the virus, adding that more extensive testing is needed to establish a definitive association between the early circulation of the virus overseas and its entry into the market.

By the end of the year, how many people will believe Chinese propaganda that the COVID-19 pandemic was caused by tainted Maine lobster?

And why is our government so blasé about dispelling this nonsensical blame-shifting from an authoritarian regime?